0:01 Almost 1 million people have visited my
0:03 website uh thanks to this strategy.
0:06 >> This is Bonu, a builder from India who
0:10 built a $13,000 MR SAS. But here's the
0:13 crazy part. He spends 0 on marketing and
0:15 still gets thousands of people visiting
0:17 his website every single month.
0:19 >> I'm a builder. I'm not a marketer.
0:21 >> I read all of your comments on our
0:23 YouTube videos, and I know you guys are
0:25 always asking, "Building is cool, but
0:27 how do I market my app?" Well, this
0:30 video is for you. Most builders hate
0:32 marketing their products, but Bonu did
0:34 something different.
0:36 >> This is the cheapest and loweffort way
0:37 to drive traffic to your SAS.
0:40 >> I brought Bonu onto the channel to share
0:42 his exact strategy. And in this video,
0:45 we'll go over how he gets thousands of
0:47 views on his website for free, his
0:49 sevenstep process that drives thousands
0:52 of clicks every single month for $0, and
0:54 why this strategy is perfect for
0:56 builders who love building and hate
0:58 marketing. If you're a builder, this is
1:00 one that you cannot miss. Let's dive in.
1:03 I'm Pat Walls and this is Starter Story.
1:05 All right, welcome to the channel, Bonu.
1:07 Tell me about who you are, what you
1:08 built, and what's your story.
1:10 >> My name is Banu and I built two SAS
1:13 products. I grew one of them to 6,000 MR
1:17 and I sold it for $250,000
1:19 and grew the other one, Site GPT, to
1:22 13,000 MR. I launched Site GPT back in
1:25 March of 2023 and so far we have made
1:27 around $500,000
1:29 in revenue. What's also cool is most of
1:31 our customers come from the strategy
1:33 called uh engineering as marketing and
1:36 I'm very excited to share my own
1:37 approach on that today.
1:39 >> I'm really excited to have you on Banu
1:41 to talk about engineering as marketing.
1:43 But first I want to understand what does
1:45 your app do? What is site GPT and how
1:47 does it make $13,000 a month?
1:49 >> So site GPT it's short for GPT for your
1:51 site. It's like giving your website its
1:54 own little brain. Like you have like a
1:56 24/7 AI assistant that answers
1:59 everything about your business content.
2:01 More than million people come to our
2:04 website so far since the launch. And we
2:06 haven't done any kind of paid marketing.
2:08 Everything has been through organic
2:11 channels. 60 to 70% of traffic is from
2:15 Google. And in Google like almost 90% of
2:17 Google's traffic is from these free
2:18 tools that we made.
2:19 >> Okay, that's amazing. Thank you for
2:21 showing off your analytics, showing that
2:23 this is a real thing, and showing me all
2:25 this free traffic that you got. We're
2:26 going to be talking all about exactly
2:28 how you got this free traffic without
2:29 having to spend on marketing. Can you
2:31 show me a little bit more about what
2:32 your site does? Could you pull up your
2:34 site and explain the business model? Is
2:36 this a SAS or it's a website? What is it?
2:36 it?
2:38 >> Yeah. Yeah. So, SiteJ, it's a
2:40 straightforward SAS product. You go to
2:42 the website, create a chatbot and put it
2:45 on your website and you just pay a
2:47 monthly fee based on how many chat bots
2:50 you need or how much content you have or
2:52 how many messages you expect uh each
2:55 month. So we get around 50,000 visitors
2:58 a month and in those 50,000 around 200
3:02 people convert to leads and in those 200
3:05 leads around 60 convert to trials and in
3:09 those 60 25 to 40% actually end up
3:11 becoming customers. Average revenue that
3:13 we get per each customer it's around
3:16 $100 and we have around 130 businesses.
3:20 So that's how we got to 13,000 MR. One
3:22 other thing like site GPT has is it has
3:24 a very large customer lifetime value.
3:27 Lifetime value is like how much revenue
3:29 you make from a single customer over
3:31 their lifetime. For site GPT it comes
3:34 down to around 1700 $1,800.
3:36 >> Okay, Bono, thank you for sharing all
3:38 those metrics with the audience. I think
3:40 it's super cool that you're super
3:41 transparent to show that kind of stuff.
3:43 So, thank you for doing that and it
3:44 looks like amazing business. That LTV is
3:46 really impressive. We're going to dive
3:47 into the engineering as marketing, how
3:48 you got all that free traffic. But
3:50 first, I want to understand how do you
3:51 even get into this? What's your
3:53 background? How do you get into building
3:54 apps and building stuff online?
3:57 >> I was a software engineer. Right after
3:59 college, I ended up joining a very large
4:01 startup. Within 8 months, I felt like
4:03 this is not what I wanted to do for the
4:05 rest of my life. So, I quit my job to
4:08 build things on my own. I moved back to
4:10 my parents house so that I won't have
4:13 any expenses and just started uh
4:15 building my own things. One of them took
4:18 off. It went to around 5,000 6,000 MR.
4:21 It's called Feather. Around like January
4:24 or February of 2023, I started seeing
4:26 all these new AI tools popping up on my
4:28 Twitter feed. So, I felt like I was
4:30 missing out. I felt like, okay, why not
4:32 spend a weekend to just try and figure
4:35 out like what this AI thing is. The best
4:37 way for me to learn is to build
4:39 something with it. So, I thought, okay,
4:41 I have 100 feather customers, so what
4:43 can I build for them? Everyone has a
4:45 blog. So I thought okay why not build a
4:48 chatbot that can answer everything that
4:50 is on their blog. So while I was
4:52 building it I realized that why like why
4:54 should I limit this to 100 people of
4:56 feather. So I thought okay why not
4:58 separate it out. So that's what I did. I
5:00 took 2 weeks from an idea to get it to
5:02 launch. When I launched it it got to
5:04 like 10,000 MR within the first month
5:06 itself. So it got so much traction that
5:09 I had no time to work on my actual
5:11 product. So I thought okay I need to
5:13 sell this to like someone who is
5:15 actually capable of making it better. So
5:18 I sold my previous SAS product fee for $250,000
5:20 $250,000
5:22 completely started focusing on site GPT
5:24 and growing it. So that's what I'm doing now.
5:25 now.
5:27 >> You showed me earlier that insane amount
5:29 of traffic that you got from Google
5:31 search and that is super cool and that's
5:32 one of the reasons why I wanted to bring
5:34 you on the channel to talk about that.
5:37 So how do you get all this free traffic
5:39 and essentially free customers to site GBT?
5:39 GBT?
5:41 >> The way I get all this traffic is
5:43 through something called free tools
5:45 marketing. Like I built dozens of free
5:47 tools like almost 50 free tools we built
5:49 in total. These are some of the free
5:51 tools. You upload a PDF and you get
5:54 markdown out of it or chatbot name. You
5:56 give some information about what your
5:59 chatbot is. It creates a chatbot name. I
6:01 should be able to somehow relate this to
6:03 my main product. So people who use this
6:05 tool should be a potential customer of
6:08 site GPT. Right now we get around uh
6:10 50,000 clicks from Google every month
6:13 and almost 90% of it is because of these
6:15 free tools and we get around 300 leads.
6:18 Majority of these leads are from Google
6:20 and I really think this is like a
6:23 easiest and low cost way and low effort
6:25 way to drive traffic to your SAS
6:27 product. If I want to create a new tool,
6:30 it takes less than 5 minutes for me to
6:31 do it because I already have all these
6:34 tools. I can just tell cursor, okay,
6:36 look at these free tools. Now, in a
6:38 similar way, create this new free tool.
6:39 This is the keyword for it. And it will
6:41 just build it out in less than 5
6:45 minutes. That's how easy it is to get
6:47 traffic from uh these tools.
6:50 >> Bananu's strategy is super simple and
6:51 there's a lot of lessons you can take
6:53 from it. But even the best marketing
6:56 strategy means nothing without an actual
6:58 product. And nowadays, AI has [music]
7:00 made it even easier to build than ever
7:02 before. And that is why we launched
7:04 Starter Story Build. It's our program
7:06 where we will teach you how to spot an
7:09 idea, build it fast with AI, and launch
7:10 it to the world. Thousands of people
7:12 have gone through our boot camps and
7:14 launched their first apps. And with the
7:16 new year coming up, we have a ton of
7:18 boot camps that I think you're going to
7:20 [music] love. If you've made it this far
7:22 into the video, I've got a very special
7:25 offer for you. Just enter code Bonu at
7:27 checkout for a special offer on one of
7:28 our starter story build boot [music]
7:30 camps coming up in the new year. That's
7:33 BH NU at checkout if you're ready to get
7:35 off the sidelines and build something
7:38 dope in 2026. Then I hope to see you in
7:39 there. Just click the link in the
7:41 description to see that special offer
7:43 and see if it might work for you. All
7:44 right, let's get back to the interview.
7:47 Okay, Bono, I really like this,
7:48 especially cuz the vibe that I kind of
7:50 get from here is that it's kind of fun
7:52 to create these free tools. You're a
7:54 builder. I'm a builder. I love building
7:57 stuff. I hate doing sales, marketing,
7:59 cold email, writing content. These are
8:01 all things that engineers and a lot of
8:03 builders watching this channel don't
8:05 enjoy doing. And it's way better to do
8:07 things that you enjoy doing. That's what
8:09 I really like about this. So, my next
8:11 question for you is, how can other
8:13 people do this? A lot of people watching
8:14 this, well, I've already built
8:16 something, they've got a SAS, they've
8:17 got something they want to figure out
8:18 marketing. What would be your
8:20 step-by-step playbook to get started
8:22 with free tools or side project or
8:25 engineering as marketing in 2026 if they
8:27 were to get started right now?
8:29 >> This is exactly like what I do if I were
8:30 to like go back and create all these
8:32 tools from scratch. Step one would be go
8:35 to HFS, go to keywords explorer, and I
8:37 leave this as blank. Like this is a
8:39 trick that I found someone sharing on
8:41 Twitter and just click on search. Like
8:43 this is especially useful if I don't
8:45 exactly know what keyword people are
8:48 using to search for it. Right? So I
8:50 would rather get all the keywords and
8:52 step two would be now we'll start
8:55 applying filters to get to my target
8:57 keywords. For example, we'll start with
8:59 an include keyword like I'm building AI
9:02 SAS. So I would include AI as a one of
9:05 the keyword. Let's say I want to create
9:08 a generator kind of tool. So I would use
9:10 a generator. you will see all keywords
9:13 that are AI generator. So this is how
9:15 you get all the keywords that you might
9:17 want to build. But this is still not
9:19 enough. It's very difficult to rank for
9:21 AI image generator. If you see here, it
9:25 was 87 keyword difficulty. Step three, I
9:28 will add a KD filter. Let's say I only
9:31 want to uh get uh keywords with less
9:34 than 10 keyword difficulty. So I just
9:38 put it as 10 and then apply. So now I
9:41 see all the AI generators that have very
9:43 low keyword difficulty like less than 10
9:45 like any decent website would be able to
9:48 easily rank uh for these keywords. And
9:50 then step four would be I would add
9:53 volume filter. So the main idea of like
9:55 this engineering as marketing is to
9:57 drive traffic uh to the website and
9:59 hopefully convert uh some of this
10:01 traffic to customers. So my next filter
10:04 is going to be volume. Okay. I need at
10:07 least 1,000 monthly uh search volume. So
10:10 like I'll just apply thousand. So here I
10:12 would look for keywords that are
10:14 relevant to my product. If you see AI
10:17 reply generator that is relevant to my
10:19 product. So you can also experiment with
10:21 more filters like more types of
10:24 keywords. For example, AI generator or
10:27 AI builder, AI creator. Step five, I'll
10:29 list all of these keywords in a notion
10:31 page. Just list down. Okay, these are my
10:34 main keywords and for each keyword uh
10:36 this is the monthly global search volume
10:38 and this is the keyword difficulty if I
10:41 were to rank for that. And step six
10:43 would be now I'll think of okay if if I
10:45 were to build this tool what CTA would I
10:48 add below this tool so that I can drive
10:50 traffic to my main product through this
10:52 tool. For example, if my product is a
10:54 chart with PDF, so I will say something
10:56 like, okay, you have tried charting with
10:58 one PDF. What if you can create a
11:00 chatbot with all of your business
11:02 content? So if you want to do that, try
11:04 site GPT. So like something like this, I
11:07 will think of CTS for all the potential
11:10 keywords that I want to rank for. And uh
11:12 finally step seven would be I'll just
11:15 create a table with uh keyword as the
11:18 main column and then volume keyword
11:20 difficulty. How much effort it's going
11:22 to take for me to build this tool. How
11:25 relevant is this free tool to my main
11:27 product. So once I have this table
11:30 written down, I will just prioritize it
11:32 based on uh tools that have high volume,
11:34 low keyword difficulty, that are easy to
11:37 build and highly relevant to my product
11:40 and then just prioritize based on that.
11:42 >> Bonner, that was an amazing playbook.
11:43 Thanks for sharing that step by step.
11:44 For people watching this, hopefully
11:46 enjoyed it. Leave a comment if you got
11:48 value out of that playbook. I want to
11:51 move over to tech stack and cost. I know
11:52 you're building this pretty much as a
11:54 solo dev. What is your stack? How do you
11:56 build this? What tools are you using?
11:59 >> I use Hrefs for SEO for creating these
12:01 free tools and I use Site GPT mainly for
12:04 website support. I use cal.com for
12:07 booking calls with customers. I use data
12:09 first and post hog for analytics. I use
12:11 something called cibili to get call
12:14 recordings from users. I use bento for
12:17 sending emails and I use uh my previous
12:19 product feather for writing blog posts
12:21 and I use feature pace for getting
12:24 feature requests and bug reports uh from
12:27 customers. I use mintify for docs and I
12:30 use cloud code for actually coding with
12:33 the and finally I use chart mgle for my
12:35 subscription analytics. Last question
12:38 that we ask all founders who come onto
12:40 starter story. What would be your advice
12:41 if you could go back in time before the
12:43 successful projects or for anyone
12:45 watching this that wants to build SAS
12:47 and do free tools marketing like you?
12:48 What would be your advice?
12:50 >> I would not spend months and months on
12:52 launching something. I would say just
12:55 launch with a very core feature of your
12:57 product and then let users feedback
12:59 guide you to figure out how the product
13:02 should go forward like what direction
13:04 you want to take with the product. let's
13:07 uh users feedback uh tell you. So that's
13:10 uh what I would say to my past self if
13:11 if I were to go back. Yeah,
13:13 >> that's great advice. Launch first,
13:15 figure out what happens next. Thanks for
13:16 coming on to the channel, Banu. Thanks
13:18 for sharing everything, all your
13:20 analytics, all your playbooks, free
13:21 tools marketing. I think people are
13:23 going to love this video. So thanks for
13:23 coming on.
13:25 >> Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Thank
13:26 you so much. I'm surprised we haven't
13:29 had an interview yet where we've really
13:31 gone in depth on engineering as
13:33 marketing, free tool marketing, side
13:35 project marketing. It's one of my
13:36 favorite things, especially for I know a
13:38 lot of builders watch the channel. If
13:40 you hate marketing and you suck at
13:42 marketing, it's going to be a long road
13:44 to get good at it. Why not just do the
13:46 thing that you're already good at, which
13:47 is building stuff and finding a way to
13:49 market that way? Would you think?
13:50 >> Yeah, that's kind of exactly what I was
13:51 thinking. this is almost like a little
13:54 hack that lets you drive traffic and
13:55 focus on what he likes to do. That was
13:57 like really fun, I think, for me to
13:58 hear. And and just see him walk through
14:00 like the keyword research stuff, like
14:01 all that is pretty cool.
14:03 >> He also mentioned something that I
14:04 thought was cool was how like with now
14:06 with AI, these tools are really easy to
14:09 create. I remember a few years ago I was
14:10 doing a lot of free tools marketing for
14:12 starter story and it was kind of a pain
14:15 to build like before the days of AI, but
14:17 now you can. He mentioned specifically
14:19 that you can do it in like five minutes,
14:20 especially if you already have existing
14:22 tools. So, you just say, "Hey, do it
14:23 like this, but for this keyword." That's
14:25 super cool. And it reminds me of one of
14:27 our boot camps, the 4x4 boot camp, where
14:29 you build four projects in four weeks.
14:31 And a lot of those are very similar,
14:33 like side project type of tools. For
14:34 anyone watching at this point in the
14:35 video, I think if you have a business,
14:38 that is a great uh boot camp to take and
14:39 maybe come out of it with four side
14:41 projects in four weeks. So, if you are
14:42 interested in that boot camp, I will put
14:44 a link in the description. That is it
14:46 for this episode. Thank you guys for
14:48 watching. We'll see you in the next one. Peace.
